Szabo was not nuts. He had long understood that he needed to do something with his hands to compensate for the work that he did indoors, and it was not going to be golf or woodworking. He wanted to grow something and sell it, and he wanted to use the property to do this. In fact, the work that he now did indoors had begun as manual labor. He had machined precision parts for wind generators for a company that subcontracted all the components, a company that sold an idea and actually made nothing. Szabo had long known that this approach was the wave of the future, without understanding that it was the wave of his future. He had worked very hard, and his hard work had led him into the cerebral ether of his new workplace: now, at forty-five, he took orders in an office in a pleasant town in Montana, while his esteemed products were all manufactured in other countries. It was still a small, if prosperous, business, and it would likely stay small, because of Szabo’s enthusiasm for what he declined to call his ranch.
It wasn’t that he was proud of the John Deere tractor that he was still paying for and that he circled with a grease gun and washed down like a teenager’s car. He wasn’t proud of it: he loved it. There were times when he stood by his kitchen window with his first cup of coffee and gazed at the gleaming machine in the morning light. Even the unblemished hills of his property looked better through its windshield. The fact that he couldn’t wait to climb into it was the cause of the accident.
The hay, swathed, lay in windrows, slowly drying in the Saturday-morning sun. Szabo had gone out to the meadows in his bathrobe to probe the hay for moisture and knew that it was close to ready for baling. The beloved tractor was parked at the foot of the driveway, as though a Le Mans start would be required once the hour came around and the moisture in the tender shoots of alfalfa had subsided, so that the hay would not spoil in the stacks. Szabo, now in jeans, tennis shoes, hooded sweatshirt, and baseball cap, felt the significance of each step as he walked toward the tractor, marveling at the sunlight on its green paint, its tires nearly his own height, its baler pert and ready. He reached for the handhold next to the door of the cab, stepped onto the ridged footstep, and pulled himself up, raising his left hand to open the door. Here his foot slid off the step, leaving him briefly dangling from the handhold. A searing pain informed him that he had done something awful to his shoulder. Releasing his grip, he fell to the driveway in a heap. The usually ambrosial smell of tractor fuel repelled him, and the towering green shape above him now seemed reproachful. Gravel pressed into his cheek.
As he lay in recovery, the morphine drip only prolonged his obsession with the unbaled hay, since it allowed him to forget about his shoulder, which he had come to think of not as his but as a kind of alien planet fastened to his torso, which glowed red like Mars, whirling with agony, as soon as the morphine ran low. It was a fine line: when he wheedled extra narcotic, his singing caused complaints, and he got dialed back down to the red planet. Within a day, he grew practical and managed to call his secretary.
“Melinda, I’m going to have to find somebody for the property. I’ve got hay down and—”
“A ranch hand?”
“But just for a month or so.”
“Why don’t I call around?”
“That’s the idea. But not too long commitment-wise, okay? I may have to overpay for such a limited time.”
“It is what it is,” Melinda remarked, producing a mystification in Szabo that he ascribed to the morphine.
“Yes, sure,” Szabo said. “But time is of the essence.”
“You can say that again. Things are piling up. The guy in Germany calls every day.”
“I mean with the hay.”
Melinda was remarkably efficient, and she knew everyone in town. Her steadiness was indispensable to Szabo, who kept her salary well above temptation from other employers. By the next day, she had found a few prospects for him.
The most promising one, an experienced ranch hand from Wyoming, wore a monitoring ankle bracelet that he declined to explain, so he was eliminated. The next most promising, a disgruntled nursery worker, wanted permanent employment, so Szabo crossed him off the list, ignoring Melinda’s suggestion that he just fire him when he was through. That left a man called Barney, overqualified and looking for other work but happy to take something temporary. He told Melinda that he was extremely well educated but “identified with the workingman” and thought a month or so in Szabo’s bunkhouse would do him a world of good. Szabo called Barney’s references from his hospital bed. He managed to reach only one, the wife of a dentist who ran a llama operation in Bozeman. Barney was completely reliable, she said, and meticulous: he had reshingled the toolshed and restacked their large woodpile in an intricate pattern — almost like a church window — and swept the sidewalk. “You could eat off it!” she said. Szabo got the feeling that Mrs. Dentist had been day-drinking. Her final remark confused him. “Nobody ever did a better job than Barney!” she said, laughing wildly. “He drove us right up the wall!”
Szabo took a leap of faith and hired him over the phone. The news seemed not to excite Barney. “When do you want me to start?” he droned. After the call, Szabo gazed at his phone for a moment, then flipped it shut. His arm in a sling, his shoulder radiating signals with every beat of his heart, he returned to his office and stirred the things on his desk with his left hand. Eventually, he had pushed the papers into two piles: “urgent” and “not urgent.” Then there was a painful reshuffle into “urgent,” “not that urgent,” and “not urgent.” Melinda stood next to him. “Does that make sense?” he asked.
Melinda said, “I think so.”
“I’m going home.”
Barney, who looked to be about forty, with a pronounced widow’s peak in his blondish hair and a deep dimple in his chin, was a quick study, though it took Szabo a while to figure out how much of his instruction the man was absorbing. Barney was remarkably without affect, gazing at Szabo as he spoke as if marveling at the physical apparatus that permitted Szabo’s chin to move so smoothly. At first, Szabo was annoyed by this, and when Barney’s arm rose slowly to his mouth to place a toothpick there, he had a momentary urge to ask him to refrain from chewing it while he was listening. It was the sense of a concealed smirk behind the toothpick that bothered Szabo the most. But once he’d observed Barney’s efficiency, Szabo quickly trained himself not to indulge such thoughts. Some of the hay had been rained on, but Barney raked it dry, and soon the shiny green tractor was flying around the meadows making beautiful bales for the racehorses of Montana. This gave Szabo something of a heartache, but he praised Barney for the job he had done so well. Barney replied, “That’s not enough hay to pay for the fuel.”
Szabo tried to ride his old gelding, Moon, a tall chestnut half-thoroughbred he had been riding for thirteen of the horse’s sixteen years. One armed, he had to be helped into the saddle. He could get the bridle over Moon’s head and pull himself up from the saddle horn, barely, but the jogging aroused the pain in his shoulder so sharply that he quickly gave up. Barney looked on without expression.
Szabo said, “I really need to ride him regularly. He’s getting old.”
“I’ll ride him.”
“That would be nice, but it’s not necessary.”